Blenders are commonly used to process a wide variety of food products, in a wide variety of culinary and other consumer settings. For example, many parents or caretakers prefer to make their own baby food so that they can control, and thereby know with certainty, the various ingredients and food products their babies are consuming. However, to make many baby foods, a combination of functionality is required. For example, blenders must provide conventional food processing functions (e.g., mixing, blending, stirring, grinding, dicing, chopping, cutting, slicing, etc.), and must also provide heating/cooking functions (e.g., steaming, etc.).
Existing blenders fail to provide a device that possesses both of these functions while simultaneously remaining easy-to-use. For example, current attempts to provide a device that synthesizes both blender and heating/cooking functions typically require complex systems that are hard to clean, challenging to assembly/disassembly (e.g., for replacement in the event of damage), require manual movement of the partially processed food from one location to another to complete processing, and/or are generally large and unwieldy.